Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society – Details, episodes & analysis

The partiality we display, insofar as we form and sustain personal attachments, is not normatively fundamental. It is a byproduct of the deference and responsiveness that are essential to our engagement with the world. We cannot form and sustain valuable personal relationships without seeing ourselves as answerable to the other participants in those relationships. And we cannot develop and sustain valuable projects without responding to the constraints imposed on our activities by the nature and requirements of those projects themselves. More generally, we cannot engage with the world without meeting it on its terms, and we cannot meet the world on its terms without responding differentially – or displaying partiality – with respect to the objects of our engagement. Partiality is thus a byproduct of engagement. We cannot engage with the world at all without exhibiting forms of partiality.

Samuel Scheffler is University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at NYU. He works primarily in the areas of moral and political philosophy and the theory of value. His writings have addressed central questions in ethical theory, and he has also written on topics as diverse as equality, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, toleration, terrorism, immigration, tradition, death, and the future of humanity. Scheffler received his A.B. from Harvard and his Ph.D. from Princeton. From 1977-2008 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of six books: The Rejection of Consequentialism, Human Morality, Boundaries and Allegiances, Equality and Tradition, Death and the Afterlife (Niko Kolodny ed.), and Why Worry about Future Generations? He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has been a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His first book was awarded the Matchette Prize of the American Philosophical Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is currently at work on a book (tentatively) titled The Lives We Lead: Personal Attachment and the Passage of Time.

This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Scheffler's talk - "Partiality, Deference, and Engagement" - at the Aristotelian Society on 20th June 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

At a climactic—and, indeed, incendiary—moment in Bernard Williams’ classic essay, “Internal and External Reasons,” Williams says that those who advance moral criticisms by appealing to so-called external reasons are engaging in “bluff”. Williams thus alleges that condemning certain actions of others as somehow not only immoral, but also irrational or contrary to reason is nothing more than a kind of pretense. To say that a favorite pastime that so many of us happily engage in is empty, well—to use an American colloquialism—“them’s fightin’ words!” Indeed, in criticizing certain moral criticisms in this way, Williams’ words are fightin’ words about fightin’ words.

Why does Williams proffer these meta-fightin’ words? Readers—and indeed perhaps Williams himself—have struggled to articulate a precise argument for this claim that there are no external reasons and that those who try to invoke them in criticism of others are engaging in bluff. Thus, the force of Williams’ point has remained, at best, elusive, perhaps even to Williams himself.

In this paper, I first want to defend Williams’ claim that the appeal to external reasons is illegitimate. But I will do so from a perspective that is radically different from the ones usually at work in considering Williams’ position. Indeed, this perspective is one that may or may not (probably not!) be in the spirit of Williams’ actual reasons for rejecting external reasons, so it is important to keep in mind (as I will remind you from time to time) that I am not offering an interpretation of Williams here. The distinctive aspect of my approach is that I argue that a rationalist line of thought can support Williams’ claims. To bring out this line of thought, I will examine the metaphysical commitments of those who engage in what Williams calls bluff. I will then reject those commitments on powerful and widely popular rationalist grounds. I will, in other words, endeavor to support Williams’ charge of bluff by investigating what I call the metaphysics of bluff and by offering a rationalist critique of that metaphysics.

Michael Della Rocca is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He has published widely in early modern philosophy and in contemporary metaphysics. His most recent book, The Parmenidean Ascent (Oxford 2020), defends a radical form of monism in metaphysics, philosophy of action, epistemology, and philosophy of language.

This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Della Rocca's talk - "Moral Criticism and the Metaphyscis of Bluff" - at the Aristotelian Society on 6th June 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Metaphysicians are in the business of making and defending modal claims – claims about how things must be or cannot be. Wittgenstein’s opposition to necessity claims, along with his various negative remarks about ‘metaphysical’ uses of language, makes it seem almost a truism that Wittgenstein was opposed to metaphysics. In this paper I want to make a case for rejecting that apparent truism. My thesis is that it is illuminating to characterise what Wittgenstein and Anscombe are doing in their philosophical writing as metaphysics without manufactured necessities. Doing so helps to articulate a sharper, more interesting, critique of contemporary metaphysical practices than therapeutic or linguistic framings of Wittgenstein’s method make possible. It also allows us to place Anscombe in the context of a tradition of British metaphysics that emerged in the 1940s in an attempt to reverse the devastating impact on ethics of the new ‘analytical’ philosophy.

Rachael Wiseman is Senior Lecturer in Philosphy at University of Liverpool. She is the author of the Routledge Guidebook to Anscombe’s Intention (Routledge, 2016) and, with Clare Mac Cumhaill, Metaphysical Animals (Chatto & Windus, 2022) — a joint philosophical biography of GEM Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch. She is associate editor (for analytic philosophy) at British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Wiseman's talk - "Metaphysics by Analogy" - at the Aristotelian Society on 17 January 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Jules Holroyd was a lecturer in the philosophy department at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests are in moral psychology, political philosophy and feminist philosophy. Her recent research has focused on how our models of responsibility and agency might be responsive to the ndings of empirical psychology. She is working on a Leverhulme funded project with psychologists at the University of Sheffield, investigating how moral responses - such as blame - might in uence the expression of implicit bias. In January 2016 Jules will join the University of Shef eld as a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow.

This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Holroyd's talk - 'What Do We Want From a Model of Implicit Cognition?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 8 February 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

James Wilson integrates philosophy with other relevant disciplines, such as epidemiology, economics and political theory to explore conceptual and practical challenges in the sustainable and equitable improvement of human wellbeing. He focuses particularly on public health ethics, and the ownership and governance of ideas and information. He received his PhD from UCL in 2002, then held temporary lectureships in Philosophy at University of Roehampton (2002-3) and Birkbeck (2003-4), before becoming Lecturer in Ethics at the Keele University (2004-8). He has been at UCL since 2008, rst as Lecturer in Philosophy and Health, and then as Senior Lecturer in Philosophy.

This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Wilson's talk - 'Internal and External Validity in Thought Experiments' - at the Aristotelian Society on 25 January 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Tim Bayne holds the Rotman Chair in the Philosophy of Neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Otago and his doctorate from the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Unity of Consciousness (OUP, 2010) and Thought: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013). His current research focuses on the measurement of consciousness and the use of neuroimaging to ascribe consciousness to brain-damaged patients.

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Bayne's talk - 'Gist!' - at the Aristotelian Society on 11 January 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Fiona Woollard is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Southampton. She works in normative and applied ethics, the philosophy of sex and the philosophy of pregnancy and motherhood. In her first book, Doing and Allowing Harm (Oxford, 2015), she argues that constraints against doing harm and permissions to allow harm are necessary for anything to belong to a person, even that person’s body. She also defends a ‘moderate’ account of requirements to prevent harm to others.

This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Woollard's talk - 'Dimensions of Demandingness' - at the Aristotelian Society on 30 November 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Jérôme Dokic is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (now part of PSL Research University) and a member of Institut Jean-Nicod in Paris. He has written many essays on indexicality, perception, memory and imagination. His work has lately focused on philosophical and empirical issues concerning noetic or metacognitive feelings such as presence, familiarity and confidence. His books include La philosophie du son with Roberto Casati (Philosophy of sound, Chambon, 1994), L’esprit en mouvement. Essai sur la dynamique cognitive (Mind in motion. Essay on cognitive dynamics, CSLI, Stanford, 2001), Qu’est-ce que la perception? (What is perception?, Vrin, 2nd edition 2009) and Ramsey. Truth and Success with Pascal Engel (Routledge, 2002).

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Dokic's talk - 'Aesthetic Experience as Metacognitive Feeling' - at the Aristotelian Society on 16 November 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Benjamin Sachs is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of St. Andrews. He has worked on issues in distributive justice, health care justice, coercion, normative ethics, environmental ethics, and the ethics of research on human subjects. He is currently interested in animal ethics and in addition is planning to write several papers that would together constitute an argument for contractarianism.

This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Sach's talk - 'Contractarianism as a Political Morality' - at the Aristotelian Society on 2 November 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

David Enoch is The Rodney Blackman Chair in the Philosophy of Law, at The Faculty of Law and the Philosophy Department, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studied law and philosophy in Tel Aviv University, where he earned his B.A. and LL.B. in 1993. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from NYU in 2003. David works primarily in moral, political, and legal philosophy. His publications include: Taking Morality Seriously (OUP, 2011); “Against Public Reason”, in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 1 (2015); “Agency, Shmagency”, Philosophical Review 115 (2006); and “Why Idealize”, Ethics 115(4) (2005).

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Enoch's talk - 'What’s Wrong with Paternalism:Autonomy, Belief and Action' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 October 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.